This week on Everybody in the Pool, would you drink a beer made from somebody else’s shower water? I did.
They cleaned it! Like, a lot. But the beer is just the attention-grabbing headline for a much bigger climate solution: capturing the water our buildings use, treating it, and using it again instead of sending it down the drain.
My guest is Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, which puts water recycling systems into large buildings. Aaron explains how the technology works, why drinking-quality water doesn’t need to be used to flush toilets or cool office towers, and how Epic’s system at San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower recycles about eight million gallons of water a year. We also get into the company’s unlikely origin story—from a high-tech pooper scooper to the Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge—and how Shower Hour IPA and Laundry Club Kölsch became tasty tools for getting people past the “yuck factor.”
In the second half, we talk about what it takes to make water reuse standard equipment: why new construction is easier than retrofitting existing buildings, where retrofits already make sense, and how water and sewer bills can drive adoption. Plus, the policies helping this technology spread, the resistance from some utilities, and what the history of elevators, air conditioning, and rooftop solar can teach us about turning an unfamiliar technology into something we wonder how we ever lived without.